Hide Me Among the Graves

hole in the ceiling, though he still couldn’t see anything.

From some direction he heard again the gasping, moaning sound he’d heard on the way down, and it seemed louder, or closer, now.

“How do we get back up the well?” he asked, barely remembering to whisper.

“We don’t go back up it. Come on.” She patted his arm and took hold of his hand and began leading him forward. “Two to the left from Chichuwee’s is the way out.” They were moving up a slope now.

“What is that noise?”

“Vox cloacarum, the voice of the sewers. Tide and pressure changes force air through all the clogged channels, and you get that.”

The sound trailed off in indistinct syllables this time, though, and Crawford thought he heard sand shifting and rocks grating in the blackness behind and below them. His forehead was cold, and he was suddenly achingly aware of the vast volumes of earth above him, between the windy streets of London and this dark intestine of the earth.

McKee’s hand brushed his face, and then one of her fingers pressed firmly against his lips; and she began tugging him along more quickly.

From behind them, echoing, came a woman’s voice: “John.”

Crawford’s ribs went tinglingly cold. He didn’t stop, but he looked back — a dim blue glow stained the darkness behind them, possibly beyond the curve of the low ceiling.

Veronica! he thought.

“That’s my wife’s voice,” he whispered shakily.

“She’s dead, I believe?”

“That’s right.”

“Keep moving. Don’t say her name.”

They plodded more quickly up the tunnel, their boots sloshing in muddy sand. Crawford dragged the fingers of his free hand along the wall and trusted that McKee had an arm extended in front of them.

The subterranean breeze was at their backs, and the seaweed-and-rot smell was gone — the air now smelled of mimosa.

“Her perfume?” whispered McKee.

A strangled syllable: “Yes.”

“John,” came the voice from behind again; Crawford could hear motion back down there, but the grinding sound seemed to imply a very big body moving. “Be safe. Stay. Forget everything. Never be afraid again.”

The mimosa scent was stronger, cloying. To his surprise, Crawford found himself wanting to obey the voice; he didn’t let go of McKee’s hand or slacken his trotting pace, but the thing behind them was at least to some extent mimicking Veronica, his wife — wouldn’t staying down here with an imitation of her, even a grotesque imitation, be preferable to his empty life in that unroofed world of cold sunlight so far above?

He remembered thinking, at the salon, that McKee was attractive — and now he couldn’t understand why he had thought so.

The breeze from behind was coming intermittently now, in puffs — was it breath, her breath?

“Father,” came a boy’s echoing voice, closer, from back in the darkness. It was the voice of his younger son, Richard. Crawford moaned behind clenched teeth.

“Johanna is still alive,” came McKee’s breathless whisper.

That was right, he had a daughter up there somewhere.

But pledged to death and eventual resurrection.

“I named her,” panted McKee, “after you.”

John, Johann, Johanna. Six or seven years old now. Unbaptized, like the poor animals he cared for.

McKee pinched his thumb hard, and then gripped his hand tightly. Her hand felt hot.

“Stay with me,” she said, quickening their pace still further and pulling him along. “I’m alive.”

And so am I, he thought, suddenly very tired. And a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on, and so did I.

The dragging sounds from behind were louder. Crawford’s legs were beginning to ache.

McKee said — no whispering now—“Do you have any iron, steel?”

Crawford thought about it as they jogged on upward through the darkness. “My watch,” he panted. “The clockwork in it.”

“A timepiece! Perfect. Quickly, stop and bash it to pieces against the wall. Don’t drop any of the pieces!”

Crawford fished his watch from his waistcoat pocket, then slid to a halt and broke a fingernail prying the back cover open; holding the watch cupped in his hand, he slammed it against the brick wall while pressing the open palm of his other hand against the bricks below it to catch any falling pieces.

“Drop the watch, John,” echoed the approaching voices of his wife and son, “time doesn’t matter here.” He could hear wet sand shifting only yards away, and the mimosa perfume was failing to cover a smell of fermented decay.

After two more rapid spasmodic blows, he had a scant, bristly handful of what felt like tiny gears.

Something webby and wet brushed his face and he convulsively lashed out, flinging the bits of metal in a wide arc behind him.

The clinging membrane was snatched away, and he spun his wrecked watch on its chain and slung that toward the voices too. The air shook with a sound like dozens of castanets.

McKee yanked him back by the collar, and then the two of them were running.

“That’s stopped them for now,” she panted, “and we’re nearly out.”

Crawford forced himself to look only forward. I’m sorry, Veronica! he thought.

And now he could see a tall, dim, round-topped shape — it was a volume of dimly lit space on the far side of a dark archway, and in moments they had skidded around the left-hand side of the arch; a wide knobby surface slanted up in front of them, and when McKee let go of his hand to begin scrambling up the incline, he followed her and realized that he was climbing up, or rather across, the face of a toppled building. A rounded stone bar across his path was an attached column, and he followed McKee as she skirted a semicircular hole that was the top of an arched doorway.

The faint illumination was coming from above them, and when they had climbed around a wide balcony and were scrambling between the holes of windows, he recognized the white glow as moonlight.

“What—is this?” Crawford gasped.

“A first-century Roman building,” came McKee’s reply, “wrecked when Boadicea destroyed London.”

Knocked right over sideways, thought Crawford with some awe as he continued climbing.

At last they came to the highest corner of the building — it was a rounded berm of masonry in front of them, probably the middle of a now-diagonal turret — and the moonlight was slanting in through a rectangular hole some twenty feet overhead.

“It’s an easy climb now,” said McKee, pausing, “and we should leave separately. We’ll come up in a yard off Portugal Street, only a few streets from your house.”

“Why didn’t we come down this way?” panted Crawford. “It looks easier than that well.”

“For getting out, it is. Entering requires protocol, though — those ghost-moths would have been … different, if we had tried to avoid the well and the incantation.” There was enough moonlight for him to see her brush her dark hair back from her forehead. “Tomorrow we need to visit somebody.”

“I’ve got business, horses to see,” said Crawford, standing on the gritty curved surface of the ancient turret wall and staring longingly up at the patch of moonlight. “I’m afraid I won’t be—”

“This woman can help us save Johanna,” McKee interrupted, “if anybody can. She knows about these things.”

“Another of your — your Hail Mary artists?”

“No — she’s a poet, actually — though not the sort to have been at that salon tonight. And she’s a sister at the Magdalen Penitentiary for Fallen Women … which happens to be right near Highgate Cemetery. Her name is Christina Rossetti.”

Crawford had never heard of her.